8
9
Katherine Kendig ’12
excerpt from Mackinac
As I walked toward the church under the slow ringing of the bells, I tried to think of Marian
stories to tell, so that when people came up to me after the service and asked, “Were you a friend of
hers?” I would have proof of our connection, something substantial to show them that I too had lost
something when Marian left the world. But Marian had never been the type of person who made
for easy anecdotes: she was steady. We’d spend weekends together during the semester sometimes,
watching movies and talking and ordering Chinese, and on Mondays I’d tell people I’d had an
amazing weekend but be hard-pressed to make them understand why.
ere was at least one story I could tell – I’d told it a thousand times, because it was
quintessentially Marian and yet the only story of its kind. It was Marian catching the light, just for a
moment, and glowing with it.
I’d come over to her dorm room one night to nd her comparing paint swatches of o-
white beige with her o-white beige walls.
“What do you think?” she said, showing me the two closest matches. “Whitewashed Taupe
or Summer Sheep?”
I squinted at the blocks of color. ere was the faintest dierence. “Summer Sheep,” I
pronounced. “Why?”
Marian nodded and stepped back. “I’m going to paint my walls,” she said.
I raised an eyebrow skeptically. “You’re going to paint your walls the color they already are?”
I asked.
She cocked her head at me, which was her way of saying I sounded judgmental. I
respectfully removed the skepticism from my face in response.
“I’m going to paint them all sorts of colors, and then I’m going to paint them Summer
Sheep.”
is time I wasn’t judging; I was just confused. “Why?” I asked again.
“Because I’ll always know the color’s underneath,” she said. “And because Home Depot is
having a sale on paint.”
So that was that. We spent an entire weekend painting her walls. ere was no pattern to
it: she’d paint bright swathes of red and cover them with smiley faces, and I spattered the paint on
like Jackson Pollock and made all kinds of owers because they were all I knew how to draw. Friends
would wander in, drag a brush across the wall a couple times and wander out again. On one wall
Marian painted six large purple elephants.
“ey don’t all have trunks,” I commented.
“I know,” she said. “But it’s their ears that make them cute.”
e result was a madness of colors and shapes, as if a hundred Crayola commercials had
exploded. We’d all written our names, somewhere or other, and the date. It was beautiful, and
Marian stood in her doorway looking at it all and grinning like I’d never seen before.
Two days later the paint was fully dry and Marian opened up six cans of Summer Sheep.
I worked on an essay on her bed in the center of the room while she rolled over our cacophony of
doodles with neat W-shaped strokes. It took three coats to satisfy her that the evidence was well and
truly hidden. When she was done the room looked exactly like it had before – a little better, actually,
because the scu marks on the walls were gone.
“Well,” she said, “that was fun.” She threw away the paintbrushes, and the next weekend we
watched a movie.
e service was beautiful but restrained. ey talked about Marian’s strength and stoicism,
her calm presence, her loyalty. Marian’s mother stood up and said that Marian had been as perfect
and serene as the water surrounding Mackinac. It was odd, to hear a daughter described like that.
After the service I stood outside the church with the tightness of tearstains around my eyes.
I stared at its pristine white siding and wondered if Marian had somehow left an invisible mark
under its gleam, something I could stumble on with a few hours and a paint scraper. Maybe I hadn’t
paid enough attention – maybe everywhere she went she slipped herself into the context. I tried to
picture her poking little pieces of Marian-ity into pillows and underneath drawer linings, or writing
in heavy-papered cookbooks with white ink. I wondered how we had fallen out of touch, exactly.
Who had emailed last? I hoped it was me. I hoped against hope that she had never been lying sick in
a hospital bed on the mainland, wondering idly if I would manage to respond to her last overture of
communication before she was gone, trying to work up the energy to tell me she was sick.
“Were you a friend of hers?”
I blinked away the blinding whiteness of the church and turned to smile a yes at whoever
had asked, but it turned out to be Marian’s mother, and I couldn’t. My face froze, guilty to be caught
even attempting a smile on an occasion that must be hideous to the exhausted woman standing next
to me.
A icker of recognition crossed her features as I turned to face her full on.
“Oh,” she said. “Allie. From school – I recognize you from her pictures.”
I nodded.
“I’m so—” I choked the words out, forcing them from lungs that had suddenly constricted.
“I’m so sorry. I wish there was…” I trailed o, unable to nish the thought. e woman’s daughter
was dead; what did it matter if I wished there was something I could do?
She put her hand on my shoulder. “ank you for coming, Allie,” she said, and turned away.
I almost stopped her. I wanted to tell her the story of Marian’s walls, and give her that
moment of brightness; I wanted to make it worthwhile that I had come. But I thought of Marian
painting those steady Ws over her riotous coloring, without even taking a picture of it rst, and I
thought of the way her mother had described her, and I decided I couldn’t. Not here in the place
where she must have known everyone; where she had been known by everyone, as sweet and stoic
and stable Marian. If Marian wanted her mother to know, she already knew. And if not – well, it was
a useless sort of loyalty, but it felt right.